Should We Ignore The Quran Burning?

Let's step away from the news cycle and realize the full stupidity of what he's doing. He has a church of, at most, 50 congregants. He decorates a bus with the message "International Burn A Koran Day" (the celebration will take three hours according to this sign). He waits for attention. He gets it! And he gets to hold the country, or at least the part of the country that pays attention to such news, hostage, with reporters getting the Secretary of State and our general in Afghanistan on the record to condemn this nobody. Instead of dying in obscurity, he'll die a has-been. Good work.

I mean, I'd like to ignore the guy too. But as uncomfortable as I was with Gen. David Petraeus weighing in the way he did, the fact is that what this guy is doing is going to appear in extremist propaganda all over the world. So it's important that American civilian leadership stand up and say they disapprove of what this guy is doing, even if they're not going to prevent him from doing it because that's not how a free society works. For international-relations purposes, they can't really afford to ignore it, especially not when everyone is reading about a rash of anti-Muslim incidents coinciding with widespread opposition to the construction of an Islamic community center near the site of the 9/11 attacks, as though all of Islam were responsible.

Meanwhile, John Boehner has adopted the rhetorical strategy of equating the consciously malicious act of burning the Koran with Muslims violating the ephemeral Muslim free zone around Ground Zero. You can sort of imagine Boehner in 1964, saying, sure, segregation is wrong, but it's just as wrong to go where you're not wanted.